November 2009
November 11, 2009No Wednesday Afternoon Lecture
November 18, 2009Dr. Daniel Kastner
"Fevers, Genes, and Histories: Adventures in the Genomics of Inflammation"
Daniel Kastner, MD, PhD, will present the annual Astute Clinician Lecture as part of the Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series on November 18, 2009. As a member of the NIH intramural community, Dr. Kastner is chief of the Genetics and Genomics Branch of NIAMS, clinical director and director of Translational Research for the NIAMS Intramural Research Program, and deputy director for Intramural Clinical Research at NIH.
Dr. Dan Kastner’s research group has had a long-standing interest in human genetic disorders of inflammation. Dr. Kastner led an international consortium that identified the gene causing familial Mediterranean fever in 1997, and his group subsequently discovered that mutations in the p55 tumor necrosis factor receptor cause a dominantly inherited periodic fever syndrome that they named TRAPS (the TNF receptor-associated periodic syndrome). Based on these findings, Dr. Kastner proposed the term “autoinflammatory” to describe the family of diseases characterized by seemingly unprovoked episodes of inflammation, without high-titer autoantibodies or antigen-specific T-cells, which are now known to be disorders of the innate immune system.
With NIAMS collaborators, his team has gone on to identify the genetic basis of other Mendelian autoinflammatory diseases, and they follow a large cohort of these patients at the NIH Clinical Center. Their recent work has extended to genetically complex disorders. The NIAMS group established the association of STAT4 polymorphisms with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus and is currently analyzing susceptibility loci for several genetically complex autoinflammatory disorders, including Behçet’s disease.
Be sure to catch Dr. Kastner's lecture, "Fevers, Genes, and Histories: Adventures in the Genomics of Inflammation" at 3 p.m. in Masur Auditorium/Building 10 on Wednesday, November 18, 2009. The lecture is also available via live webcast.
